Opera 10 Alpha now includes Opera Turbo compression

Today on the official Opera blog the company announced the release of Turbo in the newest version 10 alpha build. Turbo is a server-side technology designed to compress data before sending it to your computer, resulting (hopefully) in a bandwidth savings and speed increase.

You’ll notice a few differences with turbo enabled, such as reduced quality on images and some missing content like Flash – which is supported but may not load unless you click on the element first. SSL-protected content does not get passed through the compression servers for obvious privacy and security reasons.

After giving it a try on my desktop, I found that several pages actually loaded more slowly, likely due to the additional processing by Opera’s servers. Using NetLimiter as suggested in the blog post, however, Turbo definitely improved Opera’s performance.

Turbo is an interesting feature to keep an eye on, especially if you find yourself dealing with constrained bandwidth from time to time.